Decolonising English Studies at Liverpool

On this module, we aim to provide an overview of literature from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which involves studying a broad range of authors from diverse backgrounds. Texts and themes circulate to some degree every year based on student feedback. Recent additions are critical texts by Arjun Appadurai, Min Hyoung Song, Sara Ahmed and Claudia Rankine, and the module as a whole systemically emphasises emergent and diverse contemporary thought in literature and culture.

Theatre theory’s origins are usually traced to debates around theatre’s social role in classical Greece, particularly the work of Plato and Aristotle. While this module touches upon the European roots of certain theoretical concerns, it introduces students to a wide range of theory from different global contexts. Students learn about key methods for analysing theatre from international scholars working in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, Black feminism, Marxism, disability studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism. These methods are applied to plays and performances from across the Anglophone world, with a particular emphasis on the elements of theatre, including dramaturgy, spectatorship, acting, performativity, environment, and emotion, that distinguish it from other artistic forms.

Children’s Literature (ENGL373) has made steps towards decolonising by taking care to address the prevalence of colonialist attitudes within texts openly and directly. A visit to our Special Collections and Archives deliberately includes The History of Little Henry and his Bearer (1814) by Mrs Sherwood acknowledging the popularity of such evangelical literature alongside Sherwood’s highly moral stories, studied in tutorials. In 2025 there is a specific focus on children’s books written in English by contemporary Indian writers, e.g. Jasminder Bilan, and discussion of how some books deliberately “write back to” influential texts such as The Secret Garden. Additional resources, such as a page on Chinese Children’s literature and another on neurodiversity further diversify the module. Students may choose any children’s book to focus upon for their coursework, or to discuss alongside module texts in the final examination; those wishing to discuss questions of empire, colonialism, racism and diversity are encouraged to do so. Works by critics and scholars from a range of personal, theoretical or critical backgrounds or standpoints are included in secondary reading recommendations. We actively encourage students to recommend any resources, primary or secondary, that they find of interest and often include such recommendations in announcements to the cohort, or on the reading lists associated with the module year on year. The module is being revised during the session 2024-25 with a view to decolonising it further, building on such student input as well as extensive research by the module’s convenor, Esme Miskimmin.

The modules introduced new texts, such as The King of Tars, and extracts on the Fabulous Nations to enable more explicit exploration of racialised language and medieval attitudes to race and ways of reading spaces beyond Europe. Teaching through weekly workshops and tutorials provides opportunities to talk through historic and current attitudes to race, empire, religion, gender, sexuality, literacy and social class through literary analysis and a postcolonial lens. The titular focuses on the concepts of chivalry, female (dis)empowerment and ‘rogue’ behaviour, and what it means to be ‘Human’ or ‘Non-Human’ likewise allow for exploration of the social and intellectual frameworks underpinning colonial thought processes in historic literature. On Human and Non-Human Encounters specifically, we have an emphasis on decentring the human and challenging anthropocentric frameworks of any kind, including those based on colonialist and patriarchal systems. Across both modules we have similarly made efforts to diversify the critical and secondary reading by pointing students to scholarly work by critical race scholars and authors from a variety of nationalities and backgrounds, as well as to work focusing specifically on matters of race and gender to offer alternatives to privileged white male stances and outlooks.

I introduced materials on raciolinguistics to deepen students’ engagement with the intersection of language, race, and social justice. While sociolinguistic work often aims to challenge linguistic discrimination, it can sometimes reframe the issue without fully dismantling the structures that sustain it. Raciolinguistics, by contrast, provides a critical race-informed perspective that directly interrogates how racial ideologies shape hierarchies, attitudes, and access to opportunities. This addition allows students to critically assess why speakers who may linguistically conform to dominant norms of whiteness still face discrimination due to racialised perceptions. For example, a Black speaker of standard British English may be asked where they are from and be judged on their performance on the basis of their accent. By incorporating this framework, I encourage students to go beyond surface-level critiques of language inequality and interrogate the deeper, historical racial structures that underpin them.

While the module already engaged with social justice concerns, this addition strengthens its critical edge by positioning historical systems of oppression as the primary analytical lens through which language is examined, ensuring that these power dynamics remain central.

A few years ago I redesigned our master’s module, ‘Writing Travel’, which focused on English Renaissance and eighteenth-century accounts, literary and otherwise, of encounters with what to their authors were foreign and strange peoples and cultures. I wanted the module to further emphasise the power relations that were inherent in these encounters, to explore how these accounts were instrumental in the formation of racial types (including both blackness and whiteness), and to acknowledge and consider the place of Liverpool in the history that these texts reveal. I also wanted to be sure that the module incorporated and emphasises non-European perspectives of early modern cross-cultural encounter. To this end the module was re-designed as ‘Literature, Slavery and Empire’. The module begins with canonical Renaissance works such as The Tempest and Othello, read against the background of England’s early attempts to re-construct its image as a colonial power, and ends with the abolitionist writings of the eighteenth-century Liverpool poet Edward Rushton, published while both the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade were at their height. Crucially, it considers in detail the writings of non-European writers, such as John Leo Africanus and particularly Olaudah Equiano, to whose autobiographical account of his own enslavement one of the seminars is devoted.

At a very basic level, this module seeks to broaden the Department’s drama offering beyond the Eurocentric tradition usually encountered in English literature programmes. It ranges widely across a multitude of Anglophone theatre and performance forms, including performance art, stage drama, and musical theatre. Students encounter performance makers writing in dialects and creoles, as well as strategically adapted forms of British English. In recent years, the syllabus has included figures such as Coco Fusco, Wole Soyinka, Alfian Sa’at, Lorraine Hansberry, Kimber Lee, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and Tanika Gupta, amongst others. Importantly, this diverse range of material is studied through the entanglement of theatre and performance in the processes of globalisation and intercultural exchange associated with European imperialism and global capitalism. Learning from postcolonial, decolonial, Marxist, feminist, and liberal humanist approaches to theatre studies, students are encouraged to consider how such globe-spanning forces shape, and are reshaped by, the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of performance in diverse cultural contexts.

Science fiction as a genre emerged from nineteenth-century adventure fiction and so is inherently informed by the discourses of colonialism. Colonialism structured storylines within popular texts and created narrative tropes now associated with the genre. It also led to marginalisation of authors from different cultures leading to a canon of predominantly white Western authors.

Decolonising as a process is to identify, acknowledge, and challenge the effects of colonialism. The goal of decolonising science fiction can be broken down into two parts. The first is viewing texts though a colonial lens; examining how they reflect and perpetuate colonial ideologies. The second is to promote voices to actively address the underrepresentation of marginalised cultures and to diversify perspectives.

The guide is a curated resource for students, researchers, and teachers who want to engage with and take part in the process of decolonising science fiction. It provides links to catalogue information on critical texts and anthologies held in the University of Liverpool's Science Fiction Collections that either read science fiction through the lens of colonialism or explore science fiction voices from beyond or against colonial perspectives. The guide ends with external links to useful resources on decolonising the curriculum and decolonising science fiction as well as a section dedicated to resources for teaching held in the Science Fiction Collections.

Over the past few years we have developed the syllabus so as to broaden the range of linguistic and cultural contexts with which students on this module engage. Pragmatic theory itself draws largely on British and American traditions of scholarship, but we have introduced studies which apply and critique these theories widely, including in a variety of non-anglophone and non-Western settings. So, for instance, our students discuss speech act theory in relation to Tsoumou's (2020) study of social media posts in the Congo-Brazzaville, politeness theory in relation to LaCount, Holtgraves, Kwon and Morales-Zelaya's (2021) work with speakers from Japan, China and South Korea, and second language pragmatics in relation to Eslami et al.'s (2023) research involving Iranian learners of English.